EARNING IT; Chasing Michael, or, How to Corner a Corporate Nemesis

Michael Moore ambled irrevocably onto the scene with his 1989 documentary ''Roger and Me,'' which chronicled his often comic effort to ask Roger Smith, then chairman of General Motors, why he was laying off so many people.

Now he has a new movie, ''The Big One,'' in which he tries to ask various chief executives the same thing. So it seemed high time to shove a microphone -- a notepad, at any rate -- at Mr. Moore himself.

For a while, this quest was shaping up almost as ''Michael and Me.'' Mr. Moore gives the sense of someone who moves his jovial bulk casually through life, a man you call up and, 10 minutes later, meet for a beer.

But over several days, with Mr. Moore in the midst of a not-at-all-casual blitz of promoting the movie, calls poured in from no fewer than five people -- some in public relations, some with Miramax, the film's distributor. Yes, there should be some time on Monday. At 1 P.M., in midtown Manhattan. No, make that 1:30. No, at Miramax's office, downtown, at 3:15. No, still 3:15, but at Mr. Moore's office across from Carnegie Hall. Whew!

An assistant opened the door to a warren of small rooms, the hallways stacked high with file boxes. Michael Moore Central. Four or five people bustled about, one making travel reservations, another keeping tabs on Mr. Moore's site on the World Wide Web (www.michaelmoore.com).

What to expect? Half the new movie is Mr. Moore as (quite funny) stand-up comedian, the other half Mr. Moore as shining crusader.

In person, he was as imposing as on film, a great mass of denim-shirted man hunched over his computer, his back to the door. After finishing his work, he plopped down on an overstuffed couch, put his feet up and burst out, ''I was kidding about O.J.!'' (In his book ''Downsize This!,'' published by Random House, he has a tongue-in-cheek chapter titled ''O.J. Is Innocent.'')

So it was to be Mr. Moore the comedian? Not at all. To the suggestion that with all the comedy, ''The Big One'' is less political than ''Roger and Me,'' he responded seriously and emphatically: ''No, it's more political. The outrage is stronger. But I'm a film maker, not a political activist. We are all citizens in a democracy. That alone implies we are all political activists. Plus there's nothing wrong with giving people who work hard all week 90 minutes of a good cathartic laugh at the expense of the powers that be.''

And his message is clear: ''It's no longer about just making a profit. Corporate America is now running on pure greed. This whole economic recovery is financed on the backs of overworked and underpaid people.''

In his films, his book, and his series ''TV Nation,'' he has hammered away at the economy's inequities -- the rich getting richer, the rest clawing along on two or three jobs. Does he believe that some new economic cycle is brewing, in which workers will assert their rights to a bigger slice of the American pie?

''Yes, I do,'' he said firmly. ''That's why I ended the movie with the kids at the Borders bookstore in Des Moines organizing a union -- to end on an optimistic note.'' Soon, across the nation, ''you'll see a rise in unions,'' he said.

Surely things are not as bad as in his hometown of Flint, Mich., in the 1930's, when it was the site of a pivotal auto strike. For workers to rebel, he conceded, ''things have to get pretty bad.''

But he quickly added: ''For some people, it doesn't have to get too much worse. Unions were born when people had to work 60 or 70 hours a week. But today, a lot of people are working two jobs.'' Unions, he added, also were born in reaction to child labor. ''But in the Midwest, I see 14-year-olds working at McDonald's, not so they can buy Nikes but because they need to help pay their family bills.''

At a Borders store in Philadelphia, Mr. Moore had come across striking workers and asked them to speak out at a book signing. Mr. Moore says Borders later banned him from its stores, while Borders says that only one event was changed, because of overcrowding and a fire hazard.

''After finishing the movie, I talked to the head of Borders Inc. and told him: 'The workers didn't need a union organizer. You've organized the union by doing things like withholding money from their paychecks for an H.M.O. that had no doctor in their city.

''It is short-range thinking to downsize, to make one person do the job of two,'' he went on, growing animated. ''If you wear your workers down, they get sick more often, and because you've shoved them into these worthless H.M.O.'s, they don't really get help.''

To Mr. Moore, the ''old days'' loom large. ''My dad used to work from 6 A.M. till 2'' at G.M., he said. ''He'd be home by 2:30, before we were even home from school.'' It was clear that he treasured this memory. ''Workers were encouraged to make suggestions on making cars better,'' Mr. Moore continued. ''These days, if you're suddenly forced to do the jobs of two people, the creative part of your mind turns off. What does that do to society? Great inventions come from those moments of 'Aha!' And often it's from people with little or no formal education. I wonder if people in factories now will have the time, energy and desire to do that.''

But isn't this just nostalgia? Isn't change inevitable? Absolutely, he said: ''When you come from the working class, the way I do, you don't romanticize hard labor. You welcome advances like robots.''

Other changes he doesn't welcome. ''There's a shift to making money from money, not from labor,'' he said. ''What new ideas aren't being explored because everyone's logging onto the Internet to find out how their stocks are doing?''

Mr. Moore, 43, who lives on the Upper West Side with his wife, Kathleen Glynn, and teen-age daughter, Natalie, has made money -- plenty of it -- but he keeps it in a savings account. ''My accountant probably thinks I'm a little strange,'' he said. ''I don't own stock partly for political reasons. But I'm not making a judgment on people who do. It's partly just the way I was brought up.

''We did put a little money into a Broadway musical -- I don't want to say which one -- that's starting a road company. That's our total investment.''

In his films, Mr. Moore is concerned -- one might say obsessed -- with job losses in Flint, where for a decade he ran a newspaper. What about opening a business there now?

''No,'' he said quickly. ''But since 'Roger and Me,' I have given away $520,000 in grants, and a fifth of that has gone to Flint, for things like scholarships and job training.''

THE 45 minutes was nearly up, and an assistant poked her head in. ''Two-minute warning,'' she said, then closed the door.

So, a last question: Do any chief executives have a conscience?

A blanket condemnation would have been no surprise, but Mr. Moore resisted that. Rather, he mentioned an auto executive: Alex Trotman, chairman of the Ford Motor Company.

''Last year, there was a strike at Johnson Controls -- they fired the strikers and hired replacement workers,'' he said. ''But Trotman refused to buy car seats made by replacement workers. And his action forced Johnson Controls to settle with the union. It may be because he grew up in Scotland. There's a different tradition over there -- even conservatives believe in fair play and a social safety net.''